Update: Naya Health

Back in December, we featured the trailblazing work of a young non-profit organization called Nyaya Health that is focused on a remote part of northwestern Nepal where there was not even one physician just a few years ago. Achham is one of the poorest areas in South Asia with some of the world's highest mortality rates, particularly among women and children. Today Nyaya’s all-Nepali staff provides free healthcare to the community through its hospital and mobile health services. The organization’s open source approach with complete transparency of expenditures, operations protocols, and clinical outcomes is one of the things that we really love about Nyaya.

In honor of World Health Day today, we thought we would check in with Nyaya for an update on their work.

Patients wait outside of Bayalpata’s outpatient department to be seen. On an average day Bayalpata Hospital sees between 100 and 150 outpatients

Since we last caught up with them, the team at Nyaya has published its 2010 Annual Report. With a population of 250,000 to serve, the staff of Bayalpata Hospital are always busy. They recently had a challenging case in which a patient had been bitten by a bear. And, because children will be children, they have had to pull a few foreign objects out of ears.

Thanks to hard work and donations, like the ones made by members of the Daily Grommet community, Nyaya has made progress on two very important projects over the past three months: x-ray technology at Bayalpata Hospital and further development of the Safe Motherhood Project in collaboration with the Nepali Ministry of Health and Population.

Members of Nyaya have published a report in which they explain why diagnostic ultrasound and x-ray are ideal tools for effective healthcare delivery in resource-limited areas. Nyaya wants to work together with others to generate sufficient demand for the types of machines that would meet the needs of rural healthcare settings. For now, Bayalpata Hospital is home to one of only three x-ray machines in western Nepal which serve a combined population of over one million people.

In a place where women used to give birth at home without access to emergency care, more and more women in Achham are giving birth in the hospital which should lead to a marked decrease in maternal and child morbidity and mortality rates. Nyaya is firmly committed to education and outreach that improve health outcomes for women and children, and the organization continues to develop its cadre of community health workers who travel to surrounding villages.

Nyaya Health will be making significant investments in 2011 by building the first surgical theater in the region and powering Bayalpata Hospital with solar energy.

Thank you to all of the members of the Daily Grommet community who are supporting the work of Nyaya Health. Your donations are making a difference, and you can continue to follow Nyaya’s updates on the organization’s blog. At the moment, thanks to a matching donor foundation, all donations to Nyaya are being doubled.

To learn more about Naya Health or to donate, please visit our original feature here.